Ensuring that a communications network is operating properly is challenging because network problems can be difficult to uncover. Over the years, specialized tools have been developed to collect data from a communications network that may be helpful in identifying and resolving network problems. Often, however, these tools are created by different vendors and do not integrate well with each other. As a result, network operators typically manually correlate small amounts of the data generated by different tools to identify and resolve network problems. Since many of the tools generate large volumes of data, manually processing a substantial portion of the data may be impossible or highly impractical.
For example, in a wireless-communications network, a network operator may need to manually correlate call trace data collected by an Operations Support System (OSS) of a wireless-telephone switch with call status information collected by a wireless telephone to identify and resolve dropped call problems. Such manual correlation is inefficient because it is time consuming and requires a high level of expertise with a variety of different data collection tools and data formats.
Furthermore, to solve each of a variety of communications-network issues, the data collected by the tools may need to be processed differently. Accordingly, a tool that attempts to automate this data processing should allow the network operator to custom design his own methods of data processing for the tool.